1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems for searching through collections of information resources. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for using faceted metadata to facilitate navigation through information resources.
2. Related Art
Traditional free-text searching or keyword indexing is a simple and inexpensive search solution used by many web sites. Unfortunately, text searching requires users to guess at keywords. Typical users under-specify their searches and are disappointed in the results. To improve the precision of the search, the user's only option is to guess again with a new combination of keywords. However, text search engines give the user little or no guidance on how to improve the search results.
When text search isn't sufficient, many web designers fall back on hierarchical navigation. This can be seen in department-store e-commerce web sites. In such systems, the searcher must navigate through a pre-defined hierarchy, making a series of one-from-many selections before reaching a list of products that might or might not be appropriate.
Although hierarchical navigation works well for simple domains and for well-informed searchers, it acts as a barrier when the desired product doesn't fit the hierarchy, or the searcher does not share the web designer's view of classification. As soon as a searcher confronts a one-from-many choice he doesn't know how to make, the search fails. Often the searcher hits a dead end and is forced to backtrack with no guarantee that the desired object can be found at all.
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) has been developed to describe characteristics of web pages and other resources. RDF can improve web searching by making metadata about web resources explicit. This allows systems use of metadata to perform search queries for the associated web resources.
Existing approaches to expressing RDF queries are generally based on either the syntax and semantics of SQL, or of logic programming environments like Prolog. These existing approaches typically present results in a format, such as RDF, that is usable by machines, but is not easily decipherable by humans. Moreover, these existing approaches do not have built-in support for query reformulation and refinement during a search session, and they do not gracefully handle large result sets.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for performing web site searching without the above-described problems.